Management Training

Management training isn’t just for newbies and novices – managers and supervisors of all levels and all ages need actionable management practices to bring to their department, division or company. Learn how to be the best boss you can be by expanding your management skills, managing change effectively and bring strong leadership into your everyday management practices.

One important way to judge your success as a manger is by the success of your employees. An effective manager isn’t just a boss who can extract the most productivity from his people, but the one who produces great future managers. How can you be sure that under your leadership managers will blossom?

The concept of the “complete leader” who has it all figured out is finally bowing before the sheer complexity of modern problems. After working with hundreds of people who struggled under the old myth, researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management and MIT Leadership Center have come up with a new theory: distributed leadership.

You may dread confronting employees face to face about performance issues. But employees are far more likely to accept your critique and commit to improvement if you present those problems in a fair, concrete and "problem-solving" manner. Use these six tips as a framework to guide your discussion:

When new positions open up, HR professionals often meet with hiring managers to gather information about the job and develop hiring strategies. The problem: Too many HR pros take the wrong approach—a passive “order taking” approach—to these intake meetings. Here are ways to make the switch from order-taker to hiring consultant:

Some employees think that being the best employee in a division or company means not having to follow the rules. That isn’t true and can be downright damaging to morale. If you decide to fire the employee because of disruptive and uncooperative behavior, don’t worry that he’ll win a lawsuit just by virtue of productivity.

State Sen. Shirley Turner has proposed a bill that would prevent employers from using credit checks during the hiring process in many cases. Citing the downturn in the economy, Turner and other bill supporters note that many people have less than perfect credit, and that shouldn’t keep them from getting jobs.

It’s understandable that someone who has had a heart attack and taken time off to recover might assume that he’s disabled under the terms of the ADA. That’s not always the case. As is true of other conditions, it’s only a disability if the heart attack’s residual effects substantially impair a major life function.

Courts often hesitate to second-guess employers when they fire employees for what seem like honest reasons. And employers that set out clear performance expectations and then show how the terminated employee fell short rarely lose a lawsuit. That’s because, absent smoking-gun evidence of discrimination, fired employees have to prove they were meeting their employer’s legitimate expectations.

Q. One of our full-time employees took time off when her husband had a heart attack. We’re a small company with 30 employees. Management was very upset and wouldn’t let her take any paid time off and wouldn’t guarantee her position. She had accumulated several weeks of paid leave. Is it legal to keep her from taking paid time off to care for her husband?